July 21, 2025
Categories:
Corporate & Supply Chain
Thomas Paulson
7 minute read

Big-Ticket Leisure Activity – Softer this summer

The Fed’s latest Beige Book was released last week; the Atlanta district’s comments read, “Travel and tourism activity grew modestly, on balance, since the previous report [early June]... Group bookings for some properties did not meet expectations as international travel to the U.S. from Canada, Asia, and Europe, continued to slow. Demand for cruises rebounded from lows earlier this year.” These observations align with our story that Universal’s new Epic Universe theme park hasn’t yet lifted the Orlando Market. We’ve updated the figures and produced the chart below. As shown, the theme park activity for the 2025 summer season is just now rising above the 2024 level; we’d expect international to add slightly to the growth. Supporting that more positive turn is improved activity at the Orlando airport, as shown in the second chart below.



Another call-out was San Francisco’s “Several contacts in tourism and hospitality noted a broad-based slowing of activity in the District, including the Las Vegas area, which had been expected to remain more robust through this summer.” We see the same for the Harry Reid Airport with activity inflecting negatively in early June. The latest “official statistics” for the market is for May, with LVS handled passengers down -3.9% YoY (-3.7% domestic / -8.7% international), Vegas area visitor volume down -6.5%, and Las Vegas Strip gross gaming revenue down -3.9% per The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Based on the negative inflection in traffic for June and July at LAS, we expect all these official stats to be down from May’s level.


Thomas Paulson

Thomas has been Head of Market Insights since January 2025. Previously, he served as Director of Research and Business Development at Placer.ai, where he was instrumental in providing actionable insights derived from location analytics and the path for expansion into new verticals. His extensive background also includes two decades as a buyside analyst and portfolio manager at Alliance Bernstein, Cornerstone, and others. Prior to that tenure he worked as an economist. Thomas also currently serves as the Co-Chair of the National Association for Business Economics Retail / Consumer Roundtable.